Command the Web – an ELinks tutorial via Command Line Warriors.

Command-line browsing is not always the best approach; e.g. for flickr or a webcomic, it is the wrong approach of course.

However, for most things command line browsing works well. The system requirements are very low indeed. It is fast and secure; web pages have a consistent look and there are no flashing adverts, pop up windows or other web annoyances.

About ELinks

ELinks is the coolest command line web browser, indeed it is the only command line web browser that is both still actively developed and supports modern web pages. So as they say where I come from, “it is a good thing you like potatoes”. You can think of ELinks as the Firefox at the command line, only cooler and more fun.

Available from all good Linux/BSD package managers (the package name is normally just elinks). Gentoo users will want to look at the USE Flags carefully and enable everything that you are familiar with, you probably do want Javascript, otherwise many webpages will not work as you expect.

You might want to install it now; then this tutorial is rather more fun. You might want to put your xterm or PuTTy window in one part of the screen and this webpage in the other.

You can just type elinks to start the program, you can also add a domain name, for example:

elinks commandline.org.uk

Basic usage tutorial

Once in the program you use the ‘g’ key to bring up the address bar (i.e. the ‘Go’ box). Now you can type in where you want to go.

Navigation is pretty obvious. The ‘home’ key takes you to the top, ‘end’ to the bottom. Page Up and Down do what they say, you can also just whack the space bar to scroll down through a page. Hit the right cursor key (or Enter) on a hyperlink to follow it, use the left cursor to go backwards. Use the up and down cursor keys to work through the available hyperlinks.

When you want to use a form field or text box, select it with the up and down cursor keys then press Enter to select it for text-entry.

Use the forward slash ‘/’ to search for a word on the page, then use the ‘n’ key to show the next occurrence.

In rare cases, the webpage might not fit horizontally into your window, in that case use the square brackets [ ] to scroll the page left and right respectively.

Use q to quit and go back to your terminal.

If you haven’t already, then you probably want to get used to these basic commands first. When you are comfortable with the interface, then try to use some of the more advanced features outlined below.

Incidentally, if you know Emacs keybindings, many of the basic Emacs movement and navigation commands work in ELinks also. If you want to use a mouse for cut and paste, you need to hold down shift while you select text.

Basic Commands

g – go to URL (bring up address bar)
Home – go to top of page
End – go to bottom of page
Left – go back
Right – follow hyperlink
Up – previous hyperlink
Down – next hyperlink
/ – search
n – next occurrence
[ – scroll window left
] – scroll window right
q – quit

ELinks has a URL shortcut feature, you can type special keywords into the ‘Go’ box (i.e. the address bar) and it will resolve them into URLs. You can define your own shortcuts to your favourite sites, but there are also a number pre-included.

Depending on how the shortcut has been set up, you either type the keyword shortcut alone or you type the keyword shortcut with extra terms (sometimes both). In this latter case, you can type one or extra terms which will be sent as form data in the get request, the significance of these extra terms will vary according to the context.

That last sentence was a long way of saying that you can type ‘g fish’ and it will search Google for ‘fish’.

I decided to contrentrate on these dynamic shortcuts, so in all of the keyword shortcuts featured below, you can at least do it with the keywords, sometimes the keywords are optional.

Top Three Shortcuts

The podium places go to:

g – search google
wiki – lookup a term in the wikipedia
sd – slashdot – popular technical news site